


Carnations and Streak’d Gillyvors

by mybffwonderwoman



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Les Mis AU, Miserable Lesbians
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2017-12-13 22:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mybffwonderwoman/pseuds/mybffwonderwoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A girl who can get a free shower in a pinch.<br/>A girl who is terribly good at running.<br/>A girl with dark hair and a girl with dark dresses.<br/>Two girls who have learned to keep their head down (pretend you're not as poor as you are, pretend your father's not on the lam) see each other across a crowded supermarket and they just might know each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize in advance for any gross mischaracterization. I am new to Les Mis in all its formats. Help a girl out if I get anything terribly wrong? 
> 
> Thank you kindly.

Here’s what you need to know. 

She knows how to get a free shower in a pinch. 

Here are the things you probably would like to know.

She is not tall, but she has the illusion of height, which she has acquired from twenty years of pulling cons. You can’t slouch if you’re talking somebody into giving you money.

She’s got a face a little like the Moon in that old silent movie– round and pockmarked by childhood illnesses her parents never took her to the doctor for.

Brown hair. Brown eyes. Brown skin.

It’s a little hard to tell what’s fashionably skinny versus malnourished these days, but science says she falls in the latter category. Her dime store sweaters hang off bony shoulders and her hair has lost the luster that it had in youth.

She is twenty but she is not young. Her name is Eponine.

If you want a free shower, you have two options. There are the public pools, which are great, because they’re almost always open, but they’re in neighborhoods, so if you look like you need a bath too badly, some uptight homemaker is gonna call the cops on you even though you’re just minding your business. “Loitering”. And if you get in without being hassled, people tend to side-eye the girl who goes to the pool without a swimsuit. 

The other kosher option is the homeless shelter, but the likelihood that you’re going to be preached at or propositioned is high. Just because you’re poor, doesn’t mean you’re a fucking prostitute, nor did you necessarily become poor because of your quote unquote immoral ways. 

Some people are just poor.

Because their parents are poor.

Or shitty people.

She could shower at the motel, whichever motel her parents are trashing this week, but she tries to spend as little time in their company as humanly possible. The last time she left her backpack alone with them, they stole all her cash, and though she’s gotten pretty good at covering up bruises with CVS foundation, that doesn’t mean she’s going to go looking for a black eye from her father unless she’s got no other option. 

She could go there, though.

She thinks about the four little children still in her parents’ custody. They’re, what, in grade school now? Four hungry little mouths. She misses them. She forgets their names as an act of self-defense. 

The best bet, the most palatable option for a free shower, requires a little work. It’s a college town, so Eponine is just the right age to disappear in a crowd of rich kids with book bags. Campus is ripe for the pickpocketing, but it’s also a wealth of amenities if you know how to skirt by the rules. 

It’s a bit paradoxical, but if you want to use the gym showers, you’ve got to clean up a little before you can try to get in. Eponine isn’t a student here and you need a student ID to get past the security desk, but then again, Gary Third-Year-Business-Major works Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:00 to 5:00 pm and if Eponine wears that one nice bra she stole from Urban Outfitters and smiles like she’s not worried about how she’s going to get her next meal, Gary seems willing to listen to whatever excuse she rolls out for why she doesn’t have her student ID with her this one time. 

Gary smiles at her and tells her not to worry. Gary asks her how her week is going. Gary has not yet worked up the courage to ask her out, and Eponine knows that when he does, she will have to find a new security guard to con, but in the meantime, she just wants to enjoy the little kindness. She tries not to let it bother her that his kindness stems from desire. Kindness is rare enough in her life and sometimes she does not want to interrogate people’s motives.

It is Thursday. 4:32 pm.

(“Hey–” “Hey!” “So, I’m an idiot and forgot my ID at my apartment, I’m so sorry–” “You’ve got to get a lanyard or something, I swear to God–” “I know, I’m sorry–” “Don’t sweat it, I’ll turn a blind eye this one time–” “Thank you so much, it will never happen again–” “No worries, no worries. Have a nice day!”)

She’s in.

A few of the girls in precise blonde ponytails and Nike shorts recognize her on sight and send toothy Crest-commercial-white smiles her way, but Eponine doesn’t really talk to many people here, so she skirts past the crowds of frat daddy body builders to the women’s locker room without incident. 

God, the opulence of that locker room. Eponine gets that this school has millions of dollars to lavish on their student athletes and wealthy pupils, and, yeah, I guess if you are a student, then you’re paying for this stuff via your tuition, but she can’t help feeling that they’re getting a fucking spa for free.

I mean, she’s getting it for free, too, but she’s getting in by the skin of her teeth, and they just have to flash a badge.

C’est la vie (pronounced “cest luh v-eye”), as they say in Paris, Texas.

She’s in a heaven of white tile and for the first time today, Eponine lets the non-threatening smile and upright posture slip away. Nobody pays any attention to anybody in a locker room, that’s part of the rules, so she has nothing left to prove to anybody. No one’s going to kick her out. She can relax. She can clean up. 

It’s been over seventy-two hours in the same clothes, the same socks, the same shoes, and take them off feels like breathing fresh air for the first time after living all her life in a dank, dark cave. 

Empty shower. Crank the knobs. Water and steam. Ahhh.

She knows she is being extravagant when she shampoos twice, but she has gotten so tired of that greasy braid banging against her back– she wants her hair to feel nice for once, she wants to feel pretty.

Shit. Whoever invented hot water was a fucking genius.

Eponine is trying to calculate how long she can stay in the stall before a line forms for this shower and the water starts running cold and she has to dry off and face her life when she hears the singing. 

The voice is faint and it warbles, but somebody in the shower stall next to hers is singing “Brown-Eyed Girl”. 

She can’t quite explain it. She’s spent a lifetime learning how to eliminate the data that won’t help her stay alive and there’s nothing about this singer that either threatens or seems likely to help her in any discernable way, but she’s in a self-indulgent mood (two shampoos will cost her in long run, but it felt so good). Eponine has to see this person in the next stall. 

The song– her dad sang it to her a million years ago. When they ran a dive bar downtown and rented the rooms in the back to drunkards who left with noticeably less money and possessions than when they arrived. When there was another little girl– blonde and blue-eyed and she was the malnourished one and Eponine was well-fed and cherished.

It had been a cruel dig to the other little girl, who’d looked so differently from the rest of the family. Sure, blue eyes were considered more classically beautiful, but Eponine’s father had sung this song to prove that his brown-eyed daughter had more real worth.

It had made her feel truly precious and deeply unhappy.

But in this context, out of some stranger’s lips, in this oasis safe from the dirt and scrapes of the real world, it seems like a gentle invitation. A non-threatening hello.

There are walls between each stall. They don’t go all the way to the floor. Eponine cranes her head and catches a glimpse of bare feet, pink painted toes. She catches a whiff of honeysuckle body wash. 

She wouldn’t get caught if she peeked through the curtain really quickly, would she? She doesn’t want to intrude, she doesn’t want to be creepy, but Eponine feels some part of her behind her lungs (is that where the heart is?) aching to put a face to the voice. 

That’s not ridiculous, is it?

‘It is ridiculous,’ she tells herself in her head, even as she rings out her hair and dries off and wraps her meager, threadbare towel around her torso, even as she decides she has to see who it is.

As if she’ll recognize the girl!

It’s all ridiculous.

And then Eponine is there. There doesn’t seem to be anyone besides the two of them in the whole locker room. There’s a crack in the shower curtain– it wasn’t pulled all the way closed and looking through an open door is different than opening a closed one– all her life experience has told her that. It’s a lot easier to talk your way out of trouble if it’s the former. 

Stepping quietly forward, careful not to slip on the slick tiles, Eponine peers into the occupied shower stall.

A girl. Only her back visible. Blonde, hair long and a little soapy at the moment. Skin pink and flushed from the steam. Softness. Curves. The smell of cleanliness and flowers and late spring.

Oh.

Oh no.

Suddenly it’s weird and voyeuristic and you can hurt yourself looking at something beautiful for too long.

Eponine has to leave.

Now.

A pitter patter of wet feet on white tile, the quick and quiet rustle of a mildly clean cotton tee shirt over the head, the slap of bra straps being adjusted with speedy precision, the zipper zipped on a pair of well-worn jeans.

Before the girl in the shower even turns around to rinse her hair, Eponine is gone. She doesn’t even put on her shoes until she’s out of the gym, she doesn’t listen to Gary when he asks her if something is wrong as she rushes past his desk, her hair’s still wet, her backpack’s hanging off one shoulder, she didn’t even know that pink and gold were her favorite colors until now.

She stands outside the gym and breathes. She puts on her socks with their holes and her sneakers with their thin soles and she repacks her backpack so the damp towel doesn’t get her notebook all wet or that bag of Goldfish she’s been nibbling her way through for god knows how long. 

She stands there and breathes and a squirrel runs up to her and sniffs her and runs away. 

Eponine knows she cannot come back to this gym. You can hurt yourself looking at something beautiful for too long.


	2. Chapter 2

She is very good at running. 

This is not the same thing as being fast. Having particularly good form. Being terribly fit.

When she runs, her soul runs along with her body.

Sweat. Salt on pink lips. Slap-slap-slap of sneakers on the treadmill. 

Little tendrils of hair (the color of corn) are sticking to her forehead but she just has three minutes left on her timer and she can power through the gross frat boy with the stupid jawline ogling her ass for that long.

She dreams of the white, clean oblivion of the locker room showers and that hot water and scrubbing his gaze off her skin and¬– ah, she’s done.

Slow to a walk. Come to a stop. Turn off the machine. Pick up her backpack, which has waited so patiently for her to finish her workout all this while.

God bless. 

She’s going to have to pass that asshole on her way to the women’s locker room. Every part of her intestines cry for a witty retort to send him, hell, even something not so witty– “suck my dick”– but what’s the likelihood that this will just engage him? Start a scene?

Cosette has real training when it to avoiding a scene.

She walks past him without a word.

Here’s what you need to know about her.

You will mistake her relentless optimism for foolhardiness and you will be wrong.

Here are the things you would probably like to know about her.

She goes by the female diminutive of Nicholas (her real last name) that her adoptive father fashioned for her: Cosette.

She smiles like her body wash smells (honeysuckle).

She looks like the American dream (blonde and flushed and soft and the average height of the American female, 5’4.6”, thank you very much). 

She is a good Catholic girl and she also likes girls.

She can handle a great deal more stress than you can probably imagine– this is a girl that is attending a state university with a fake Social Security card and no friends, so imagine that– and if you asked her who she’d step in front of a bullet for, she’d first say, “Anyone”, and then clarify that first and foremost, she’d be willing to die to save her papa.

She goes to war everyday and her armor is a black linen sundress and a flower crown.

And oh man in a couple of minutes she’s going to be clean.

Cosette weaves her way through her fellow students to the locker room. One of the sorority girls– perfectly coifed and made up, with pristine on-brand workout gear (well done, her)– catches her eye and pretty pointedly sends a little eye-fuck her way. Cosette takes fifteen seconds to do the mental analysis on the possibility of getting this wayward Kappa to come home with her but then remembers that unless 98.7% of the student body, she does not actually have independent housing. 

God bless him, she lives with her adoptive father, and that puts the kibosh on any lady callers. 

Her dad’s lucky she likes him, Cosette thinks as she drops her eyes to the concrete floor that’s been made up to look like limestone or something. 

No, she corrects her thoughts. She’s lucky to have such a father. And if she gets luckier still, she’ll save enough money to pay for a dorm. 

Dream and dream and take on more hours as the student receptionist for the Liberal Arts office.


End file.
